


First Law of Thermodynamics

by leopoldjamesfitz



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Spacetime Challenge @ thefitzsimmonsnetwork, TW: Brief mention of miscarriage, but there's a mention, it doesn't go into detail
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-29
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-12-08 08:27:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 16,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11642721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leopoldjamesfitz/pseuds/leopoldjamesfitz
Summary: Jemma awoke with a start, heart slamming against her chest and her ears ringing. A surge of panic coursed through her, unlike anything she had ever felt before. But of course, the last memory she had was being swept up by the monolith before she’d woken up here.She immediately begins to scan the room around her, eyes focusing into the darkness and after a moment, her gaze settles on Fitz. He is sleeping, she realizes after a moment, and she feels the panic begin to ebb and flow away from her. Had it all been a dream?“Oh, Fitz!” She gasps quietly, careful not to be too loud and especially careful not to wake him up. Stumbling from a nightmare isn’t the way she wants their first morning together to be like – it must have been a nightmare, right?She begins to focus on him more, mostly out of habit. She traces the light scruff on his cheeks, so familiar to her now, and the soft purse of his lips as he sleeps. He is far too clothed for the kinds of dreams she has been having about him lately, but she takes what she can get in this moment.Now edited to feature the aforementioned and promised epilogue.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [whatlighttasteslike (waitingforeleven)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/waitingforeleven/gifts).



> First of all, I would like to say MAJOR thank you to accio-the-force on AO3 for beta-ing this last minute. Her help was exceptionally wonderful, especially given that I asked for it so late. (My bad, honestly.) Also, special thanks to Melissa (whatlighttasteslike/waitingforeleven) who spurred the idea by asking me, quite plainly to write it. Evidently, this is for you.
> 
> For those of you who might have read the tags and wanted to stray away, please be advised that is the smallest little moment, but I wanted to more or less cement the idea that tragedy happens in every universe, just in different forms. And not always in the best of ways. If you would like to skip this part, when you begin to read the section "Not everything she learns about...", that is the best part to skim over briefly. I don't even actually use the word miscarriage if we're being frank with one another, but the warning is there in case this makes you uncomfortable. Please be advised.

Jemma awoke with a start, heart slamming against her chest and her ears ringing. A surge of panic coursed through her, unlike anything she had ever felt before. But of course, the last memory she had was being swept up by the monolith before she’d woken up here.

She immediately begins to scan the room around her, eyes focusing into the darkness and after a moment, her gaze settles on Fitz. He is sleeping, she realizes after a moment, and she feels the panic begin to ebb and flow away from her. Had it all been a dream?

“Oh, Fitz!” She gasps quietly, careful not to be too loud and especially careful not to wake him up. Stumbling from a nightmare isn’t the way she wants their first morning together to be like – it must have been a nightmare, right?

She begins to focus on him more, mostly out of habit. She traces the light scruff on his cheeks, so familiar to her now, and the soft purse of his lips as he sleeps. He is far too clothed for the kinds of dreams she has been having about him lately, but she takes what she can get in this moment.

Laying back down slowly, she shuffles against his side, daring to place her head on his chest. It feels warm, almost natural. Fitz begins to shift underneath her, though the most moving he does is tighten an arm around her waist and pull her toward him. It’s the first time since she’d woken up that she feels at ease.

Falling asleep again, after that, comes almost naturally.

 

* * *

 

When she wakes again, hours later, the sun has risen. It’s quiet in the room and when she peels her eyes open, she finds the bed beside her suspiciously vacant. It makes her instantly curious, especially after looking at the time and noticing it was just past seven and Fitz has always abhorred being awake before nine at the least. His side of the bed is cool to the touch, making her think that he hasn’t been there for quite a while, and her curiosity turns to something else when he steps out of the bathroom wearing a towel.

“Good morning,” he greets, a soft smirk on his face that is so unlike Fitz, but arousing nonetheless. She almost slips out of the bed and tears the towel from his waist, but the confusion nearly has her pinned to the bed. “Sleep well?”

Small talk wasn’t really on her agenda for the first morning after they would have together, but she concedes to his question after a moment of hesitation, shaking her head. “Not really,” she confesses, chewing on her lower lip. “I had an awful dream.”

Fitz stops mid-way from his walk toward the closet, turning toward her quietly. “You should have woken me,” he levels her with a playful glare, but the seriousness behind his tone is nothing to play around with. Jemma almost feels her heart stutter. It’s only been a few short hours since their union, she thinks, but he says it with such conviction that she can’t help but think that he would want nothing else for her to wake him up in the middle of the night. She turns her head away from the ferocity of his gaze, blushing a little.

“You get cranky when you’re woken early,” she says, matter-of-fact and lifts her head, just in time to see the curious crinkle of his forehead, and for a minute he looks like he might say something, but he decides to press his lips together in a thin line. She notices the hint of confusion in his features, but decides not to press that subject. “I will next time,” she concedes. “I promise.”

Fitz nods succinctly, smiling briefly at her as he disappears into the closet. When he’s out of the room, she begins to look around quietly. It’s bright in the room, unlike she’s ever seen from the Base before; there’s a big bay window that is covered up by semi-sheer curtains, and a dresser and apparently an ensuite bathroom and closet. She hasn’t been in Fitz’s room since, well, before the accident, he’d always abandoned her at the doorway, but she can’t ever picture his room, which was only down the hall from her own, would be this bright and this nice.

That is, of course, when her confusion begins to set in.

Jemma thinks clearly over the last evening, what she can remember of it. The details are inexplicably vacant in her mind. The more and more she thinks, the more she realizes the very last thing she can remember is being asked on a date by Fitz himself, and then the next thing she knew, she was being sucked up into that... that thing.

Things are, naturally, confusing to her. She would like to think that she would remember every single second of her time together with Fitz, but it’s like it never happened. And everything gets a little more complicated when she rushes her hand over her face and feels the stubby end of a ring poke against her brow bone. She hesitates for only a moment before she pulls her hand away, staring wide-eyed at the object around her left-hand ring finger, and then the crested loop beside it.

When Fitz returns, she drops her hand instinctively, looking at his frown of concern, though he still doesn’t pester her – she’s not sure why, the Fitz she knew would naturally pick until she opened up. Is this not her Fitz? Was her purported dream from the night before... not a dream? “You sure you’re okay?” He asks after a long moment, tugging at the loop of his tie as he pulls it over his head, pulling it together masterfully. His hand doesn’t shake, but her heart does.

Jemma begins to slowly put the pieces together, but she doesn’t know what they all mean just yet. She’s here, with Fitz, in somewhere? Is this the future? She smiles a little at that thought. “Yeah,” she whispers quietly, clearing her throat. “Yeah, I’m just… a little thrown off by that dream. I think I’ll take a sick day.”

His concern doesn’t waver a millimetre, if anything it grows and he crosses the room, fixing his collar as he approaches. Sitting down on the edge of the bed, he reaches across and takes her left hand in his. The first thing her eyes see is a matching band on his hand and she swears, no matter how scientifically impossible it may be, that her heart skips a beat. He watches her for a long moment, concern and confusion etching its way over every single inch of his face, and he traces shapes on the back of her hand with his thumb as he lets out a slow sigh, nodding. “I’ll tell them,” he says after a long moment, and she wonders if he was at war with how to proceed with her comment in mind. It’s likely, she thinks quietly. “Just rest up, and feel better, yeah? I haven’t seen you this shaken in quite a long time.”

She wants to ask him which incident he’s referring to, and it’s on the tip of her tongue, but she bites it back. Fitz leans forward, brushing his lips against her forehead. “Just... call me if you need me, alright? I’ll be back here in a heartbeat.”

His confession warms her, though the confusion still settles. Jemma is not sure where she is, but she has a startling feeling that this is not home. Or at the very least, her home.

“Of course,” she whispers after a few moments, smiling in return. This soothes him some, which makes her happy, and when he leans down to brush their lips together, she tilts her chin up and tries to memorize every inch of his lips in the short kiss, but there’s a familiarity in the movement that makes her heart lurch. Wherever she is, they’ve done this a hundred thousand times before, so much so that this Fitz doesn’t take advantage, doesn’t swoop down and try to press more fervor into the kiss. It’s quaint, simple, and worn, but it makes her heart beat erratically.

“I’ll see you later,” he says, brushing another kiss along her lips and pushing himself of the bed. Before he leaves, he grabs a discarded suit jacket and pulls it over his shoulder, looking so unlike her Fitz who wears cardigans like they’re a second skin. “Love you!” He calls behind him, rushing toward the staircase.

“Love you,” she echoes quietly, mouth gaping open as she drops her gaze back to the hand with the ring on it, staring quietly.

Where the hell was she?

 

* * *

 

After enough perusing through what appeared to be their home, Jemma decided this most certainly wasn’t her version of home. As much as she enjoyed the wedding photos, or the silly pictures of each other they – well, this version of Jemma and Fitz – had scattered among their home, it was very clear to her after only a few hours that wherever she was, it wasn’t the place that she had been looking for in the first place.

She finds her phone – her _actual_ phone – lodged in the pocket of her jeans that had been discarded on the floor. There is another phone there with a snap of her and Fitz on it, one that screams to be owned by this-Jemma, but she can’t seem to figure out the pass code for it, and for whatever reason, the Touch ID does not work either. It’s almost a relief when it all comes down to it and she lifts it up, eager to call her Fitz, to tell him she’s safe, only to find that she has an error message when booting up. _No Service_.

Well, shit.

She thumbs through the apps on it, picking idly at the other phone as she places both on her lap, thinking of a number of combinations it could be – her Mum’s birthday, her Dad’s birthday, her birthday? On a hunch, she tried 0-8-1-9 and is only slightly surprised when the phone unlocks at last.

Of course she would use Fitz’s birthday, of all things.

There are more pictures where her lock screen came from, about a dozen or more that she nearly spends hours just looking at. It makes her feel unusually warm inside, but at the same time very vacant. It’s like she’s looking at the life she’s always wanted to live, except it’s not her own. She doesn’t own this life, and she realizes eventually that she needs to find her way back. The only question is how she can do it without startling Fitz.

Popping up her own phone, she takes pictures of the home, if only for a reminder, and the greenery around the backyard. She doesn’t know where she is, but by the accents she’s hearing, she suspects Scotland. It makes her heart burst with something familiar, but she’s not sure. As night draws closer, the wind cooler, she checks the time and notices it’s just after five and it's nearly dark already. It must be near winter here, which is confusing given that where she’d come from, it had almost been summer. After a long few hours of contemplation, she sits on the back deck and opens up the photos app on _her_ phone, choosing one she’d taken of Fitz in later months, when he’d almost been looking.

“I’m not sure where I am, Fitz.” She finds herself talking to the picture, which is ridiculous enough given that there is another Fitz (god, that is going to get confusing) mere moments away from returning, she suspects, but as alike to the man she loves that this other man might be, he isn’t the very same. “But it’s quite lovely here,” she confesses after a moment, even more quietly, despite the truth behind it.

The large backyard, the cozy home, the smell of Scottish air, it’s everything she’s been dreaming about for years, it just took her a little bit longer to realize that she had wanted that with Fitz. She remembers a small cottage when she was a little girl, on some family holiday, all of a sudden. They’d been driving through, she can’t even remember where now, but she’d found it so lovely. This home is not in any way that, but it’s close.

“It makes me think of the life we could’ve had...” she sighs wistfully, pulling her lower lip between her teeth as she traces her thumb over the photo of him, if only to keep the phone from timing out and going dark. “The life that we will have.” She decides after a moment, conviction in her voice.

But before she can say another word, she hears the front door close and a loud, “Jem?” pour through the empty home. She casts a final glance at the picture of her Fitz and smiles slowly.

“I’ll see you soon,” she promises, and tucks the phone away into the baggy sweatpants she’d thrown on, holding the phone that belongs to _this_ Jemma in her hands as she walks in from the cool night. Fitz is standing in entry way when she appears, looking understandably worried. His entire frame nearly crumbles at the sight of her. “Hi,” she whispers quietly, trying to pick out the differences instantly between her Fitz and this Fitz. Appearance wise, they’re nearly identical, except this Fitz seems to have a better fashion sense naturally, whereas hers has been mismatching patterns since before they’d met. She wonders if that was this Jemma’s influence on him, or if that had always come natural to him. “Sorry, I was just out on the deck. It’s quite a nice night, isn’t it?”

Fitz furrows his eyebrows at her, looking remarkably stunned. “It’s in the minuses, Jem.” He tells her, crossing the room to grab one of her cold hands in his. She’s wearing a hoody that she thinks might be his, given how big it was. Tucking her phone into the pocket on the front, she allows him to take her other hand and watches as he wraps both of his around hers, blowing warm air through a crevice. “You’re a bloody madwoman sometimes, I swear. Sometimes I forget I’m the one who was raised here.”

She laughs at that, because it’s genuine and his candor is muchly appreciated in that moment. It’s almost like he’s her Fitz for a second, by the boyish way he wrinkles his nose as he takes her into his arms, easily sliding his hands in under the hoody and the vest she’s wearing underneath, placing his warm palms along her back. She shivers under his touch, realizing that, perhaps, she might have been a little colder than she’d thought. Instinctively, she leans into him, tucking her head under his chin. They’ve never had much of a height difference between them, and it makes her crane her neck almost uncomfortably to stand there like this, but his embrace is the only thing that feels right.

“Had a good day at work?” She asks, delving into the same small talk that they had begun earlier. She can’t tell much about their occupation from the photos she has on her phone, or the ones hanging around the home, but there were two certificates for two PhD’s in the very same fields that she had studied in the other reality that make her feel somewhat comforted that her interests hadn’t changed that vastly.

Fitz nods against her head, though the movement itself is brief. “As best as can be expected,” he tells her, though she can feel his heart wasn’t in it. “It’s not the same without you there,” he adds after a moment, much more quietly than before. “That’s ridiculous, isn’t it? We’ve been working together for nearly a decade and I can’t imagine one single day without you.”

It makes her heart lurch, some of the things he says to her. It’s so open and honest, and she can’t wrap her mind around how she could ever be this lucky, in any version of reality. It makes her almost yearn for what they could be once she gets back.

She doesn’t doubt for a second that her Fitz will be doing everything in his power to get her back.

As nice as this Fitz is, she misses her own. Misses the way he stumbles over everything, misses the way he smells, misses the way he looks at her like she put all the stars in the sky. She’s never even realized that she could miss these things before now, but she does.

“It’s kind of romantic,” she teases quietly, a small smile pulling on her face.

Fitz laughs gently, rubbing her back slowly. “Hmm,” he hums, pausing for a brief moment. “That can’t be right. We both know you’re the romantic one.”

This playful bantering, the quiet jokes they share, the laughter – it’s all so real. It’s almost enough to reel her in, let her drown in the reality they’ve made for one another, but she holds on.

In the kitchen light, she lets this Fitz hold her, all the while feeling her heart ache dully for the one she’s lost.

 

* * *

 

A large part of Jemma is confused. Waking up to this reality and being with Fitz, it was like slipping into a glove, almost seamless. It both startles and excites her that being with Fitz could feel this natural. But it’s not real. She constantly reminds herself of that, if only to keep her head above the metaphorical waters.

It’s not easy, because sometimes the way this Fitz looks at her is enough to drown in.

And sometimes, the way he kisses her makes her yearn for more.

And sometimes, late at night, when he’s holding her, it feels so real she swears her heart is crashing in her chest.

She hates herself for not telling him the truth immediately, but in what reality could she say something like that and not sound completely mental?

But it’s not real, not completely, and somewhere along the line Fitz realizes it too. She doesn’t know exactly when, but she starts to feel him questioning her movements much more, and when she goes to work – they apparently run a small independent lab – and has to ask more questions than have answers for herself, he is patient with her, but there’s only so much one man can take.

It’s almost expected that he eventually asks her what on earth is going on, as if he hasn’t asked himself a hundred thousand times already. She knows Fitz well, and in any version of reality, she knows that he trusts her – goodness, that wasn’t even a question – but he knows her better than anyone else knows her.

Really, she can’t believe nearly two months has passed before he sidles up to her on the couch and she tucks her head into his shoulder, a familiarity behind the movement now, and asks in a quiet voice, “You’re not my Jemma, are you?”

His question nearly knocks the air out of her lungs, and she thinks that it actually might’ve, given that she can’t seem to find her breath all of a sudden. “It’s okay,” he says after a moment, and she pulls away as he drops his hand to her shoulder, rubbing it soothingly. She’s not sure when he figured it out, but no version of Leopold Fitz is an idiot. She wagers he’s been second guessing it for a while now.

“I’m afraid not,” she whispers after what seems like a lifetime, pressing her lips together in a tight line and trying to blink back tears. She can’t understand why she’s emotional over this, it seems bloody ridiculous. She’s not been exactly lying to him per-se, but she hasn’t been exactly truthful with him either. Dipping her gaze away from him, she exhales quietly.

Fitz is staring at her, which should make her uncomfortable, but it doesn’t in the slightest. She can’t look up to meet his gaze for a long while, confused as to whether or not she really wants to know what he’s thinking, what’s going through his mind. “Where is she?” He asks quietly, in a much smaller voice than before.

Jemma’s heart aches, because in all the time she’s been thinking about where she is and what that means and where all of this can go from here, she’s not once thought about where this Jemma had gone. Did she go into her body? Did she die? She squeezes her eyes together and feels her lower lip tremble because in almost every scenario, she can’t imagine one that ends up well for either of them. “I’m afraid that I do not know,” she confesses after a long moment, clearing her throat as she bites back emotion. “I barely know where I am,” she tells him after a moment, a shaky smile on her face.

It isn’t the first time she’s admitted it, not to herself and certainly not out loud, but it feels somehow worse than any other time she has thought it before. It makes her feel like she’s just ripped out this piece of her and all that’s left is hollow. When she finally lifts her head, turning to face Fitz, he’s looking at her with almost pity in his gaze, but she’s not the one who lost a husband, she lost a maybe-something and neither of them likely knows how to get that back.

“I always believed in the Multiverse Theory.” He says after a long moment of silence, an almost smile on his face, though it looks like he might break at any point in time. “Jem... she did, but there wasn’t enough science behind it for her to fully ever commit to it.” He explained, pressing his lips together in a fine line as he tosses his gaze between his hands and her. “I’ll have to tell her all about this when we get her back.”

The air really does leave her lungs this time, but the warmth that fills her is something unlike anything she’s even felt before. The unyielding faith that this Fitz has in his Jemma is something akin to the kind of faith that she’s always had in her Fitz and she nearly cries then, feels the leaking of tears as she stares at him.

They’re going to get her back, she thinks, and the only thing she can hope is that in turn, he gets his wife back. The Multiverse theory never really explained interdimensional travelling and the repercussions, after all.

 

* * *

 

Understandably, things do not get easier just because he knows that she isn’t his wife. If anything, they get harder.

He stops calling her things like sweetheart, but ‘Jem’ sticks.

He stops trying to hold her hand, though she sees his reach out more than once before he stops himself.

He stops looking at her like her Fitz looks at her, but just barely.

Except, he finds himself staring at her more often, tracing features. By all accounts, she looks just like his wife. Same hair length, same mahogany eyes, same laugh, same smile. As she catches his eye, he drops his gaze instantly. “Sorry,” he apologizes quietly. “It’s just a bit weird, I keep thinking that this is some joke she’s playing on me, that you’ll tell me at any second that it was actually her all along.”

Jemma frowns sympathetically in his direction, nodding her head slowly. She knows that feeling and understands it. She wishes that this were just a bad dream she was waking up from, but that’s never been the furthest from the reality. “I wish it was,” she tells him honestly.

“So, you’re not... you?” There’s a hint of uncertainty in his tone, like he needs to hear her say it, to make it all the more real.

“Well,” she pauses, pushing her lips together. “I am. Just another version of me, I suppose.”

Fitz nods slowly, because there isn’t much to understand except that nothing makes sense now. Two months before, she’d been elated because Fitz and her were finally taking a new step in their relationship, and now she wasn’t sure if she’d ever see that man again, all the while staring at his almost-clone.

“You’ll have to forgive me.” He says, sighing softly. “This situation is... a bit odd. Even for our standards.” A slight smile pulls on his face, but it wavers before faltering altogether. “It’s hard to separate you from her, especially when I can’t really point out when one of you ended and the other of you began.”

She understands, and his statement makes her heart clench uncomfortably because she knows he blames her a bit, for not telling her immediately. She wonders how she’d gone off this long without either of them getting hot and heavy, but wagers he’d felt the separation long before he’d eve come to terms with it. “I understand, it’s one of the oddest, really.” She smiles despite herself, shakily breathing out. “It’s not every day that you wake up to a stranger.”

Lifting his gaze slowly, he stares at her for a long moment, nodding his head. “Yeah,” is all he says before he exits the room.

The rift that has been created is weighing them both down, and she can’t be angry, not with him, but with herself.

After all, her lying is what started all of this.

 

* * *

 

The First Law of Thermodynamics states that no energy in the universe is created and none is destroyed.

Much the same, the Multiverse theory is revolved around an infinite possibility of other realities. So, a part of Jemma hopes that his Jemma is in another reality, creating herself a new place in another Leopold Fitz’s life while she waits for her time to come back.

Jemma does not entertain the option that his Jemma could be dead, because he doesn’t. It’s as simple as that.

She doesn’t like the idea that somehow the artifact that S.H.I.E.L.D. had transported her into another body, and its host had been somehow destroyed while she’d been placed. She wants to hope that there’s some kind of happy ending for all of them, but realistically, that might not be the case. She tamps that thought down, though, because it doesn't help anyone.

Fitz is ever-present, ever-helping. So much so that it almost makes her think of her own Fitz from time to time. She wonders if this is what her Fitz is like now, trying to find her with such a passion that it could make her heart clench if she knew the reality. He is intelligent too, and has more theories than she can count by the end of their first day trying to put the pieces back together, trying to figure out what happened.

He’s so Fitz it almost hurts to look at him sometimes, and yet he’s not Fitz at all. Not the Fitz she’s known since she was sixteen years old.

They met earlier than that in this reality, she finds out. They were fourteen and both attended the same university. It took him longer to talk to her, though; they were seventeen and both nearly ready to finish their first PhD’s simultaneously before he gathered the courage to tell her he found her fascinating. Apparently his Jemma had called him a dork and kissed him right there on the spot.

Jemma finds herself wishing she’d done the same to the poor, unsuspecting Fitz before he’d wandered off to find dinner reservations for them both.

Neither of them joined S.H.I.E.L.D., but instead, stayed local. They were offered a position in a small lab after the start of her second PhD in Scotland and they’d taken it immediately. For the first few months, she’d bided her time between working and studying and by the end of their second year in Radcliffe Inc., she had completed her second PhD. They were eighteen at the time.

Fitz didn’t take as long to ask her to marry him, however. They were very young when they became engaged, and had stayed engaged for nearly half a decade before they put the funds together to buy a home, the home they now lived in, and married in the same week. The ceremony had been quaint and quiet, exactly what they wanted most, and when Jemma asked where the beautiful gown she’d been wearing had come from, she’d been almost floored by the answer.

It was a combination of both of their Mums’ dresses, actually. His Mum had gotten together with her Mum and the two of them had been conspiring for years, waiting for the day when they’d be able to put together their plan. Neither Fitz nor Jemma had wanted to take their parents money and try some extravagant wedding, not because they didn’t want to feel endlessly in debt to them, but because it wasn’t something they’d even seen themselves doing. When they’d called their parents and told them that they would be marrying at dusk, his Mum – whom apparently had stitched together a beautiful gown a few years before – produced it. Jemma had been planning on wearing a simple white gown, one that she ended up wearing to their honeymoon months and months later.

Everything about this reality was breathtaking and her heart yearns for a similar reality of her own one day.

Fitz bounces into the lab on his heels one day, carrying an armful of papers and underneath those papers, his jacket. His eyes met hers and he almost looks excited – she’d grown to know that look over the years of being friends with her Fitz, but this Fitz almost always had that look when he had a hunch, or had come across something outlandish. Of course, in recent months, she’d seen that look many a times. None of them have been met with success just yet.

“I think I’ve figured out how to get you home,” he declares, holding his hands up just as she turns her head motions for her to not fight him – not just yet. She obliges, simply because he’d almost asked politely. Almost. “Or, at the very least, I have a theory.”

Jemma sighs dramatically, rolling her eyes as she focuses back on the computer screen in front of her. “And _I_ think that I’ve heard you say that at least a hundred times.”

Fitz scoffs quietly, rolling his eyes too as he approaches her bench. “C’mon Simmons, that’s not fair.” He states playfully, nudging her side quietly. They’ve grown more in the area of being friends, which is odd enough, but she likes that no matter which universe, that they can come together and possibly find happiness for the other. She thinks that she could learn to love this version of Fitz, but as long as hers is out there, fighting for her return, she’ll do the same. While this Fitz reminds her a lot of her Fitz in a number of ways, it’s never in the ways that matter the most.

Propping up on the bench, he folds his hands together on top of the metal framing, eyes wide with a mixture of delight and apprehension. “I actually think I have a solid theory, though, I promise. You said you were transported here by some... unidentified large, rectangular shaped object, correct?”

Fighting the urge to roll her eyes again, because they have been through this a dozen or more times before and she’s never found any concrete proof that what transported here even _exists_ in this reality – she’s stopped thinking that this was the future, which was foolish enough to think of in the first part, considering you couldn’t break through the fourth dimension, but anyway.

“Correct,” she decides to humor him after a moment of consideration, saving her work before she turns toward him, leaning one elbow on the table to her side. “And we’ve exhausted literally every avenue trying to think of what it could have done – opened a time warp in space, did a ‘Freaky Friday’ scenario, switched all of my potential alternate selves around... we’re no closer to a solution here, Fitz.”

He nods, because he knows that she is right. They have gone over a number of different ideas, different things that could have happened, but he is happy enough thinking that this one might be the right one, for once. It’s been just over four months since this Jemma inhabited his wife’s body, and just over two since he actually learned of that truth, and he misses doing stuff like kissing her head and holding her hand, both of which he’s expressly forbidden himself from doing since he learned that there had been a purported swap of identities. It’s not the same without his wife around, anyway.

“I think I’ve found something pertinent about the monolith – that’s what they’re calling it here. It has history that predates all of humanity. It was created by some species called the Kree, I’ve never really heard of them, as a means of banishing someone, and throughout history it was used as such. There’s only been one study, incomplete, regarding what actually happens to these purported ‘banishments’ but I got something else, possibly an old wives tale, really, that says the monolith was made to give new life on one plane, while taking it from another. The punishment was meant to, more or less, banish the person from the identity they once were.” He pushes out a burst of air as he stops, holding his hands on his hips. This news might very well be news, but it doesn’t sound like good news in any way, shape, or form.

Jemma frowns quietly. “So you’re saying my other body is... dead?” She asks, raising her eyebrows quietly. “Doesn’t that mean that your wife is as well?”

He shakes his head, no look of sorrow in his eyes at all. “That’s what’s fascinating about all of this. This... this monolith. It doesn’t kill the bodies; it transports the soul but the bodies are almost always safe. That’s the theory at least. Like I said, there’s only been one real study about it and it was incomplete, but the theory was that a person could withstand transportation through the monolith and cross across planes to return to their own without disturbing the different realities.” He folds his hands together in front of him, almost looking like he was praying as he held his hands to his lips, pointing toward her after a moment of thought. The movement is so akin to her Fitz; it makes her feel warm that their mannerisms as similar. “I’ve traced a similar monolith, not necessarily the same, to a facility in Boston. It could be on our only chance.”

Furrowing her eyebrows, she crosses her arms over her chest. “And how do you expect us, two civilians, are going to manage to get into said facility in Boston of all places? We’re an ocean away.”

“We’re not.” Fitz says, grinning wider than before. “You are. You said you had spy training in this other life, right? Well, sweetheart, it’s time to put that to use.”

 

* * *

 

Boston is a bust.

S.H.I.E.L.D. exists in this realm, but they’re not the ones who has the monolith. Rather, it’s a covert government-run group called the ACTU and their leader has eyes in the back of her head. Jemma’s truly lucky that she didn’t get arrested breaking into the security feed – using tricks that Daisy had taught her once – in order to see every inch of the building.

Frankly, if asked, Jemma wouldn’t have been the first one to volunteer. She’s aware that there are likely areas in every corner of the building that do not show up on the schematics or the security cameras, because every government-run organization runs with the same code in mind. But she cannot get in without a flash of a badge.

Even if she tried to steal one, even if it made a difference, she’d likely be imprisoned the moment that she was caught face to face with the monolith. And besides that, it wasn’t likely that she could manage to carry that thing, or stay there long enough in hopes that it would do something, repeat the actions it had done a few months before and suck her into the blackness.

It does not make any of it easier. She feels like she was so close to a solution, and yet so far. Standing in the middle of the hotel room, Jemma tugs his hoodie over her shoulders, letting it dangle open as she shoves her hands into her pocket. Fitz reaches and grabs them in between his, the only comforting thing he can do and she can’t even be mad at him for this potentially foolproof plan that had its kinks, because she hadn’t thought of that either. She is used to a world where she has some amount of power because, even while S.H.I.E.L.D. is technically still underground, they had enough pull in the agency community that she would have been able to slip in right away.

Jemma cannot afford to somehow find the monolith and be returned to her body, only to have both Jemma and Fitz in this universe be arrested for trespassing among other things.

Frustrated, she pulls her hands away from his and places the heel of her hand in each eye socket, rubbing them furiously as she tries to pull back the urge to cry. This is just another set back, it was to be expected. The lead in Boston – it was flimsy. It required her having to lie, and Jemma has never been good at that.

(Apparently, in this life, she’s even worse.)

“Jem-“ Fitz shakes his head, cutting himself off as he runs his hand over his face. On foreign soil, neither of them really know where they’re going. The last time Jemma had been in Boston was when her Fitz had gone to MIT. MIT doesn’t exist here, and she can’t understand how something so simple makes everything final about this world.

S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy does not exist in this realm either, and Jemma tries not to think about how it seems like every pinpoint of her and her Fitz’s existence just doesn’t seem to fit here at all. Almost as though she wasn’t destined to have anything to hold onto.

“How do you know?” She asks suddenly, ripping her hands away from her eyes and staring up at him. The question startles him, almost as though he hadn’t been expecting her to ask anything. It’s quite possible that he didn’t. Fitz stares, open eyed and mouth bowed open just a fraction of a centimetre, a curious, but sad look on his face.

Really, the lead in Boston was flimsy – she told herself again.

Clearing her throat, she tries to swallow down any emotion lingering, though her efforts aren’t at all appreciated. “How do you know that getting me back to where I belong will bring her back?”

She hates the question the moment it leaves her mouth, because it makes her skin crawl and she wants to revert, she doesn’t want to know but she does at the same time. Fitz has kept quiet about a lot of the life he shared with his wife, outside of the details that Jemma had asked him in order to keep her head straight and not make anyone who might know them as Jemma and Leopold Fitz-Simmons curious as to why these two people who’d been so in sync for such a long time could fall out of it all of a sudden.

But Fitz’s look has softened some; there’s a moment where she thinks he might break apart at the seams from the prideful look that crosses over his features, and another where she thinks he might break apart from the reality they’re in.

“I don’t,” he tells her honestly, after a long while, fixing his gaze on her. They lock eyes and Jemma feels another tear leak out of hers and run down her cheeks. “But she hasn’t failed me yet. My Jemma – wherever she is – she’s kicking ass and taking no names trying to get back to me.”

A watery smile pulls on the edges of her lips as she nods her head slowly, trying to push back the overwhelming urge to just break down and cry. It was only a setback. They could do this – they could find a way. It didn’t matter if they were out of sync because they weren’t each other’s other half, because they could still piece together that hope and pull together a happy ending for them both.

“I hope you’re right,” Jemma says finally, running her tongue along her lower lip as she lets out a shaky sigh, dropping her gaze. “Now what?” She says, because in all this time they’ve put into this plan – they’d never put together a Plan B, or a Plan C, or a Plan X-Y-Z. They’d been foolish to think this would work the first time out of the gates, but she thinks hope is a foolish thing sometimes.

“For now?” Fitz asks, scratching his ear as he moves to lean his chin on his hand, peering out the small window of their hotel room, watching the first rays of the sun begin to peek through. She hadn’t realized it was that early. “We’ll watch the sunrise. And tomorrow? We’ll try again.”

 

* * *

 

In a lot of ways, Fitz is everything like the man she left behind.

In a lot more, he is not.

He says the same about her, really. It’s sometimes easy for him to become disillusioned and forget that she’s not his wife and the only thing keeping her afloat is the reminder that he’s not her... whatever she could call Fitz, really.

After the Boston incident, it slows her down some. She loses faith, loses the thought that there might be a small chance for her to get out of this alive. It’s natural, she thinks, to lose faith in the face of turmoil.

She can’t help but think that she’s losing faith in her Fitz all the while, and she thinks that’s the worst thing about all of this.

Jemma can’t remember a time when she didn’t completely trust Fitz. Even when he woke up from the coma, even when she betrayed his trust by leaving, she’d always trusted him.

They learn more, know less and come no closer to a solution day in and day out.

But perhaps this monolith was a punishment afterwards, or at the very least it had intended to be one, and there was no going back to her home.

After a while, Jemma began to sink into her reality, and accept it for what it was.

Home is what you make of it, after all.

 

* * *

 

Not everything she learns about this reality is as nice as what she learned in the first few weeks of being in it. But, she supposes, not everything is supposed to be.

It happens one day on a cool December morning. Fitz has been acting strange all morning, tossing between picking up and putting down a single piece of paper and staring at the screen in front of him. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, which for all intensive purposes both of them are, to decipher that he’s distracted. She’s been unfocused, too, neither of them moving ahead on this project at all. At times it feels like they’re only moving backwards sometimes, but that’s not what’s bothering him today.

“It would’ve been her birthday today.”

She’s not even really sure if he’d meant to privy her to this piece of information, or if it had just been a slip up, but the air rushes out of her all at once when he says it, running his hand over his face.

Confusion instantly engulfs Jemma like an inferno and she pauses, halfway through reading another lost cause on the study of the monolith, or so she thinks. Fitz has paused too, looking blindly in front of him. She can’t see him, but she imagines there’s horror in his eyes.

It’s then that she realizes he probably hadn’t meant to say that, or perhaps these months have begun wearing down on him, too, and he forgot for a second he wasn’t talking to his wife. (He’s told her it’s hard to decipher from time to time, she knows; sometimes when she wakes up to him scattering across the kitchen – she’d insisted on taking the couch – she thinks that it’s her Fitz and the last few months had been a bad dream.)

The date is 11 December, a few months off of her birthday, and she doesn’t think that Fitz is talking about his Jemma’s birthday at all, not from the look on his face. His birthday is the same as her Fitz’s, and without real assurance, she is positive that his Jemma’s falls on hers. She hopes that she isn’t still here next September to find out.

“Sorry,” he rushes and stands up, folding together the papers he’d been poking around at, shaking his head quickly. “Don’t know why I said that.” He continues, but there’s a raw edge to his voice now. She really isn’t privileged to pry into his words, or ask him what he’d meant, but it’s on the tip of her tongue as she turns her head back to her work. Or, at the very least, attempts that much. She finds herself looking back toward him, still confused but sympathetic at the same time.  

Sniffling, he tries to continue on with his work, but he can feel Jemma’s eyes burning into his back. She’s thankful for this, because it stops him from running away before she can find the courage to ask what or whom she was referring to. It takes her longer than she’d anticipated, because she can’t imagine a way this conversation will go that doesn’t instantly make her heart break.

In some realities, she thinks, she and Fitz never meet.

In others, they hate each other and that’s that.

In the vast majority, they fall in love – though it’s always a different way.

In some they have a house full of children.

In others, like this one, they never can.

Fitz tells the story like it’s still fresh in his mind, and she guesses that it probably is. They were still young, then; barely scraping twenty when they learned the news.

“It was... quite honestly, irresponsible.” He tells her, because it’s the truth, and sometimes his candor is the most brutal thing about him, but she doesn’t ask him to stop. “Jem, she had her PhD work and the lab and neither of us were being as careful as we could’ve been.”

He scoffs as he says it, like he’s thought of everything a hundred times before and how much he could have changed it. Jemma does not doubt that he has thought of quite literally everything, and has considered all the variables, especially in recent months, and wondered what it would be like to slip into another reality where all of this didn’t exist.

“But it happened – she did.” He swallows again, holding onto the edge of the table as he speaks, like he needs something to help keep him upright. Jemma stares at his back, focusing in on the tension. “Brightest in our classes, you’d think we’d have everything thought out – but not that at all.” There’s a self deprecating laugh that falls from his lips, and she swears it shatters her heart when it does. “Jem, she wasn’t feeling like herself one day, went home early – lord knows I kept her the hell away from chemicals and the lot the day we found out but she was in the office most of the day, grumbling about paperwork or some nonsense and she just went home – said she had a headache.”

The way he says that shatters her again. This reality had seemingly been picture perfect, but she realizes silently that pictures often lie. At the very least, it seems like these two are happy and that they love one another. They didn’t let their traumas get in the way of that. “We’d just found out she was a, well, a she.” He tells her after a long moment of silence. “I came home and, well, I suppose you can put the pieces together.” There’s a small sound that erupts and it takes her a moment to realize it’s a sob. Standing slowly, she crosses the room. “Sorry,” he whispers again, more quietly than before. “This’ll be the first year in seven that she isn’t here to...”

He doesn’t finish his sentence, but he doesn’t have to.

It’s then that she vows, no matter what sacrifices she has to make, that she’ll get his wife back. If it’s the last thing she does.

Jemma tells him, much later, that her Fitz tried to give his life for her. That her Fitz woke up from a nine-day coma without the ability to speak and that her Fitz still has trouble with his left hand. That her Fitz did it because he couldn’t live in a world that didn’t have her in it, without thinking that she felt the same way, but it doesn’t seem appropriate to juxtapose their pains now.

For now, she places her hand on his shoulder and lets him grieve for the daughter he’d never known and the wife who’s still lost to him, as he’s done to her many times before since she’d slipped into his life.

 

* * *

 

“What if,” he poses one morning while they’re eating breakfast. He’s eating some awful sugary endeavor, while she munches happily on a bowl of mixed fruits. “What if the monolith is only supposed to be a one-way trip?”

Jemma’s look in his direction computes enough of a response that he immediately jumps up, abandoning his cereal bowl and grasping at a pile of papers. “I know it sounds crazy, but maybe the reason that people could never return to their realities is because they focused on the monolith. It doesn’t take you back. But maybe somewhere does.”

Jemma snorted around a strawberry, dropping the paper she was reading as she lifts her head up toward him. He’s gone over this theory once before, though she thought at the time it was because his wounds were still fresh from failing to get her to the monolith in time. She’s not sure which researchers have done the studies that they’ve both found on this monolith transportation device, as all the names have been suspiciously blackened out, but the more she reads, the more she thinks that this has Hydra written all over it. Perhaps they shouldn’t feed into any study of that nature, but it’s the only thing they’ve gotten. “And I suppose you’ve got an idea of where exactly we should go to find this purported transport point?”

Fitz shakes his head quickly, biting on his lower lip. “Not quite,” he tells her and she stares quietly, trying not to glare. “But I have a theory.”

It’s not the first time she’s heard that phrase either. Jemma tries very hard not to feed into his theories, but also not to discourage him from searching through every possibility. There’s times when he’s more desperate than she is to find a solution, but she understands more that there’s more of a reason for him to want his Jemma back than there is for her to want to go back to her maybe-something. They’ve had years, side-by-side, just the two of them. She’s only ever been a replacement card, and she’s fine with that.

“Fine,” she says after a moment, popping a blueberry into her mouth. “Tell me about it.”

He always gets so boyish when he tells her his theories, and she begins to think, not for the first time, that this reality is very close to the one she left. There’s some variables that have been changed, but in a lot of ways, _this_ Fitz reminds her so much of _her_ Fitz. Perhaps their personalities don’t change throughout the different realities, but the circumstances do.

“I found a study that I’ve been keeping from you.” He says, all in one breath and from the moment he says it, she can tell that he knows he’s done wrong and almost looks like he needs to repent. “I know we’re sharing everything, but this one kind of seemed like it was written by a madman and I couldn’t even make sense of most of it, except for this theory of how the monolith might operate.

“Basically, this man, his name is Doctor...” he paused, lifting up the paper too close to his eyes. (This Fitz needs glasses, but apparently his Jemma hasn’t quite convinced him that he needs to invest just yet.) “Whitehall. Fucking madman, if you ask me. Anyway, he made a theory that a portal, not specifically the monolith, exists within this universe and others. It’s like a gateway. He never names the monolith, but he refers to a specific stone object that could be used to engulf its victim and transport them along the different realities. But it can’t return them home.”

Jemma listens to him speak, trying not to freeze when the name Dr. Whitehall is brought up, because she knew a man in her realm that shared that name too; he was an awful man, and she still doesn’t care for him. She’s glad he’s dead, even if his alternate self might hold a key to something. She almost wants to tell Fitz to stop, to halt his investigation on this topic, but somehow what he’s saying makes sense.

People have theorized interdimensional traveling since the Multiverse theory came alive. It had never been proven, only theories, but if the monolith exists, there must be a way.

“However, he also references a break in the fabric of our reality, which I know, is where it starts getting a little crazier. I wouldn’t doubt that Dr. Whitehall did a line or two while writing this, but there’s some proof that there’s an area, likely abandoned, in the Southern Hemisphere, that is where this ‘breaking’ of the fabric of this reality might exist. He wagered it was the portal back. There’s some urban legends that if you go at the exact location that many have foretold in recent centuries at the exact right time, you’ll be able to find it and, well, the paper wasn’t finished by Dr. Whitehall himself, but rather a student of his who went on to say that Dr. Whitehall found this location and purportedly disappeared right in front of their eyes and has never returned.”

Jemma looks up at him, wide eyed and confused. “You know how crazy this sounds – there can’t be proof that this even existed, or that the paper wasn’t finished by Dr. Whitehall himself who then went on to disappear from reality in his own way – right? It doesn’t explain how the monolith could take me from my body and replace it into your wife’s at all.” She feels her hopes slowly begin to die, because whatever hypothesis he’d come up with is too far fetched, even for them. They’ve seen crazy, seen mad, but it’s too much now.  “Fitz, I understand this might be hard for you to accept, but running after dead ends... I can’t even be mad at you for withholding this paper, it’s bloody insane.”

“Yeah,” he says, more somber now. “Yeah it is, but there’s some calculations in the paper too, that Dr. Whitehall went over, and longitude and latitude. Coordinates, maybe. He apparently went just after Christmas time, if the study is anything to go by, so maybe the appearance is random, maybe it’s not. There’s not a lot of data on that. If I’m pointing it right, it lands us right on the outskirts of Brisbane, Australia.”

“And if you’re not?” She asks, because she can’t help but feel annoyed and elated at the same time. It’s a long shot, longer than anything they’ve done yet. There’s a finality in this movement, one that makes her think that this is likely their last chance.

“If I’m wrong,” Fitz tells her, turning back and placing the papers on top of a growing pile. “Then we both come home, and we live out the rest of our days like this.”

Jemma can’t even feel excited that there might be a chance, a throw in the distance, that she could go home, because it’s all based on fables and tales, but she knows he’s right. There’s a nervousness deep in her belly that she can’t help but acknowledge and a large part of her wants to give up, because a small part of her already has.  “We have to take a chance,” she says after a moment, lifting her gaze as he slowly turns to look over his shoulder at her. Against her better judgement she consents, because if this is the last chance they both have, at least they gave it their all. “It’s the least we can do for them.”

She doesn’t clarify whom she’s speaking about, but there’s a look in his eyes that makes her think he was thinking the exact same thing. His wife, her... she really needed a better phrase for her Fitz other than maybe-something, but really, that’s about all she had. They hadn’t crossed the proper boundaries yet.

It’s funny, she thinks, that after all this time she actually believes all those times that people said she and Fitz could read each other’s minds, because it almost seems like it now.

(There’s a feeling in the pit of her stomach, deep down, that makes her wonder if that being successful in this endeavor means his wife will be coming home too, a feeling of pure despair, because in all their calculations, they still hadn’t figured that one out.)

 

* * *

 

“Jemma?” She almost freezes as they walk through the field. Their calculations had led here, though she couldn’t understand why. The research is mostly unfinished, and probably always will be, and the fact that she didn’t need another monolith to return home is still something that both scares her and thrills her, because without her S.H.I.E.L.D. badge, she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to walk into the ACTU and complete that task. Interdimensional traveling is weird, and completely unstudied from her knowledge, but she couldn’t have ever imagined that it would lead her to a meadow in Brisbane.

But that voice, if she hadn’t been walking right next to this Fitz, she would’ve sworn it was him.

“Jemma?” The voice calls again, and her heartbeat raises immediately. Her eyes lock on this Fitz and he’s staring at the empty space ahead of them, eyes wide and confused.

This Fitz has literally stepped on the edge with her the entire way, since learning his wife was no longer with him, and she can’t find the words now to tell him how grateful she is, but she hopes he knows. “God,” he says after a moment, looking across the empty area they’re in. The voice is coming from right in front of them, but there’s nobody there. “It’s like hearing a recording but...”

Jemma smiled quietly, feeling her heart lurch as she takes a step forward, lifting her hand out and watching with a gasp as it disappears into nothingness. Instinctively, she pulls it away, inspecting it. “It’s real.” She says, both meaning the voice they are hearing and this shift.

They’d tried to stick to the archive dates, because without knowing much about what Dr. Whitehall had been reading, it was hard to decipher just when the ‘portal’ as it were would appear. Apparently, it didn’t appear it all.

She knows, logically, it must appear only once in awhile. Otherwise, she imagines more people would know about this location. More people would be curious the way Dr. Whitehall once was. Perhaps this isn’t the only location, but this entire experience hardly makes any sense to her. It still doesn’t explain to her how she could wind up in one place and have to leave in a complete different one, but the study of the monolith wasn’t supposed to make sense, she supposed.

The object itself had been made by aliens, for God’s sake. Jemma, in her reality, had dealt with this almost every day, and still had more answers than questions.

“Jemma?” It’s definitely Fitz’s voice, but not the one she’s standing next to. She wondered if it was possible that they could be operating on the same schedule being realities apart, or if it’s her insanity crying out to her, but the way this Fitz freezes every time he hears it, she bets that she isn’t the only one hearing it. “Oh god,” his voice is filled with relief. Relief floods through her as well. The entire plane ride over, she’d been thinking about how she would have to settle into this life, how she’d have to resume his wife’s life and she hadn’t considered the possibility that there could be a happy ending. But it’s within her grasp now. How it was possible, she’d never know. “I can see her!”

Twisting toward this Fitz, she exhales slowly. “Say hello to her for me, will you?” Jemma asks quietly, not quite meeting his eyes as she folds her hands together, wondering where she’ll end up. The research they’ve done on the monolith has been thorough, but whether or not she will return home is  up to the universe. The journey they’re going on... it’s a mystery. Once she crosses through, there’s no guaranteeing she’ll make her way to her Fitz. She can only hope that, after all this time, the universe wants to give back to her. “And take care of the both of you. Because Lord knows, one of you has to have your head on straight.”

There’s a crinkle in his forehead before a soft smile appears on his face and he dips his head, shaking slowly. “She’ll never believe me,” he tells her after a while. He reaches across and grabs her hand, squeezing it briefly. She can’t help but wonder if there is a similar knot in his chest, wondering the same thing she is – if her leaving means his wife, his Jemma, will return at all. “But I suppose it’ll be like a dream to her, wherever she was.”

“Jemma?” Her Fitz is calling again, still sounding like a thousand miles away except for the fact that he’s near her. So close she can almost feel him, which is ridiculous considering there’s a wall, a break in reality as it were, between them He’s closer than he’s been in months and she’s never felt happier in her life.

With a watery smile, she drops the hand of this Fitz, saying a silent prayer that his wife does come back to him, that she’s not lost among the universes. “I have to go,” she whispers softly, stepping back toward the sound of his voice. The portal is not far, not in reality, but the phase shift this body will likely have to undergo once she steps past that specified point will make her near invisible to this Fitz. Especially considering they cannot see her Fitz, only hear him. She wonders if it’ll be like seeing a ghost.

Meanwhile, her Fitz waits on the other side. She prays that the universe pays its dues. “Take care of yourself, Leo,” she grins quietly, watching as his nose wrinkles, but he stares wistfully as she turns around and nearly disappears before his eyes.

All the while, he stands guard, waiting for his wife to return to him.

 

* * *

 

When Jemma wakes again, she’s in an indistinct room and there’s a brief glimpse of a moment where she thinks that everything - the last six months - was a very bad dream. One where she dreamt she was swept off to an unknown land with another Fitz who held different memories than her own.

But then everything comes back to her, as slowly as it does, and she remembers the last time she woke up in an unknown room, how her memories had lacked and her paranoia had spiked. This time, when Jemma wakes, she remembers everything - everything down to...

_Fitz_.

She opens her eyes and searched for him. He’s right there, she realizes after a moment, dozing against the headboard and fingers running through her hair. Relief pours through her instantly.

It’s not the Fitz she’s grown to know in the past six months, and she knows that even before he opens his eyes in her direction and faces her.

“Jemma,” he whispered, and the way he says it is too soft, so soft. She wants to reach up and kiss him, like she should’ve the day he asked her on a date. “You’re awake,” he says in awe.

The last thing she remembered was stepping over the invisible line separating the realities. It’s almost like the last time she woke up, but there’s less panic now. “What happened?” She asks, her voice hoarse and shaky. She’s instantly filled with emotion – because they did it.

And then another wave rushes as she realizes she’ll never know if they actually did everything they’d intended to do that day and bring his wife back to him.

“You passed out,” he says simply, licking his lips slowly. “I found you... wherever the hell we were and you were just there. I thought you were dead.”

The way he confesses that last part makes her feel equal parts fragile and warm. “I’m right here,” she says after a long moment, because she’s not sure what else to say to him. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She wants to kiss him, wants to find the energy to surge up and do everything she’s spent half a year planning out in her head, but she’s so tired. She doesn’t remember feeling this tired the last time she did this, almost like it took more out of her to return to him. She wouldn’t change it for the world.

Instead, she curls her head onto his leg and tells him each grueling detail of the last six months of her life, while his fingers run through her hair and he listens. Really, it’s all he can do.

“It was a different world, but so much like ours,” she tells him, awe hidden in her voice and she’s filled with a rush of images. Their home; she hadn’t thought to find her phone, but she thinks she’ll do it later. It’s not important now. “Little things changed, they met differently, loved differently.”

She’s careful to refer to the other Fitz and Jemma as ‘they’ and ‘them’ or ‘he’ and ‘she’ because they _aren’t_ them. They’re literally a different version of them, with different experiences, different memories, different lives.

“You’d like him, really, he’s a lot like you.” She tells him patiently, running her hand down the length of his thigh, moving to cup his knee gently. His head cradles the side of her face, thumb slowly tracing along her jawline. “Actually, I take that back.” She says in a rush, making his eyebrows raise as she shifts, laying her head flat on his lap. “I can’t even imagine that, the two of you would probably agree to much. I refuse to even contemplate _that_ reality. I’m not even making it happen in my head.”

Fitz’s laughter is the most beautiful thing she’s heard in months, even though she’s heard it all before now, a hundred times over. The switch is harder than she’d imagined, but her Fitz’s laughter sparks something within her that the other Fitz’s laughter never did. Deep within her body, deep within her soul, she thinks that she knows this is home.

Fitz leans down while she’s mid-thought and her breath catches in her throat. It takes all of her to not collapse back against his knees when their lips brush. It’s much slower than anything she’s spent months dreaming about, but she realizes that she doesn’t need a big ‘moment’ – it’s never been needed for the two of them. She just needs him.

Despite her heaviness, she lifts her hand up and cradles his cheek as his arms wrap around her and they kiss, somewhat awkwardly, until he parts and begins to laugh in the distance between them. Jemma thinks she might be offended, if not for the fact that she was laughing too. Sitting up slowly – with a lot of the help from his fumbling hands – she cups both of his cheeks and leans her forehead against his.

“Not as extravagant,” she comments once their laughter both dies down, feeling the warmth in her heart and her soul when he pulls back to look at her, his blue eyes drowning her almost immediately. “But just as magical as I’ve been picturing.”

It seems rather foolish that it’s been nearly ten years of them dancing around one another, that they hadn’t come to this conclusion before now, but it hardly seems the worst case scenario for them. The things they’ve seen, the things they will see together, they all amount to nothing in the grandness of this moment.

As Fitz’s lips fall to hers once more, she finds herself picturing that cottage again, but it’s in a different life. It’s theirs, and for the longest moment, other than the swipe of his tongue, it’s the only thing she can focus on. She hums against his lips and feels it as he smiles against them. For all she’s pictured this, she imagines he’s done it just as much.

She doesn’t ask him if he gave up hope, too, because she decides that she doesn’t want to know the answer to that question.

She doesn’t ask him what lead him to finding her in the first place, or how it was possible that they could still be so in sync with a universe between them. Not tonight, at least. Questions like that are reserved for another day.

As he pulls away again, she can’t help the soft sound of disbelief falls, but her heart only warms more when she hears his hearty chuckle. “I think there’s some other people that would like to say hello,” he tells her, matter-of-fact. “I’m going to be shit on for hogging you.”

“Tomorrow,” she says into the distance between them, barely anything when she thinks about it. He’s so close she can almost feel his small smile on hers. “I think we’ve got some catching up to do, don’t you?”

He pulls away from her suddenly, then, and she opens her eyes to see his wide ones, but there’s a blinding smile on his face and the only thing he can do is utter a helpless, “yeah.”

She kisses him this time, though it takes a moment for his smile to dissipate and she thinks that everything she’s dreamt of in this moment could never have matched the reality this moment promised. The softness of their lips as they brush together, the feeling his touch ignites within her, even the way his hands alternate between cradling her skull and her back. She could never have imagined that their union would be this wonderful, because as much as she knows Fitz, _her_ Fitz, he’s always been one to surprise her.

In the soft darkness of the room, she sighs against his lips and threads her fingers through his hair, just as he steadies his left hand along her lower back. It’s trembling, she thinks, but this time, it’s for a different reason.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As promised, here is the epilogue. This is fluffy. Special thanks to @theclaravoyant for reading over and beta-ing. I hope that you enjoy this journey :)

Fitz watches helplessly as the Other Jemma disappears behind the wall. If he hadn’t been watching it in real time, he thinks, he would have never been able to believe it. In a lot of ways, he supposes that this is life. There are always things that blow your mind and you can never replicate them; perhaps never even come close. Unfortunately, that does not make the fact that he is now alone on this side of the universe any better.

Now, he can do nothing but stare aimlessly at the expanse in front of him. If he did not know that there was a wall there, he might have assumed that the field went on forever. Of course, he knows that there is only a short period of time during which the portal appears, the one through which the other Jemma had left to seek her own Fitz out. It both scares him and makes him nauseous to think that it’s been nearly two minutes and nothing.

Ten minutes goes by and when he reaches his hand out, the wall is still there. His hand still disappears.

If he’d thought clearly about this, perhaps he would have brought some rope with him and tore through the universe searching for her. But he realizes that his Jemma, his wife, the most terrifyingly maddening woman he has ever met, would not want him to risk his life saving her ass.

She would be the one to revive his dead ass, only to kill him again, if he ever thought to do something like that.

So he sits and waits, as patiently as he can manage.

After twenty-five minutes, Fitz begins to think that this was a load of shit. That the past six months, the research they had put together, had never came to a conclusion regarding his wife because there simply hadn’t been one to find. No one had ever survived this that they knew of.

No one had lived to tell their story.

Fitz reaches out again and finds that the wall is further back now, as if it is disappearing, and he begins to feel nauseous again.

He cannot remember what life is like without Jemma Simmons: she’s been the only constant in his life since he was fourteen years old, and he can’t imagine the universe taking her from him. It doesn’t seem right. Sitting down in the grass, he lets his head fall between his knees.

But then again, he had once joked that the cosmos was against them. Of course, that was because they had missed the meteor shower by mere minutes because they had gotten... distracted. But perhaps it was true.

Fitz closes his eyes when forty minutes pass, mentally beginning to say goodbye. At least, he thinks, she will probably find a way to come back to him if he lets himself die out in this field - if only to kick his ass.

He’s never known a life without Jemma Simmons, because life isn’t life without her, but he has to face facts that maybe, this time, she’s lost to him. He’s spent a little over four months trying to bring her back to him, trying everything in his power to ensure that it would happen, and maybe in another universe she’s smiling at that, calling him a dork for putting this much effort into something so trivial, when he complains about shoveling snow every winter.

Just as he has resigned himself and decided to step away, he hears it: the soft sound of coughing and then...

She’s there, in front of him, sprawled out on the green grass and panting heavily. He thinks for a moment that it might not be his Jemma, maybe the other one having lost her way again.

He hopes that’s not the case.

Crawling on his knees toward her, Fitz watches with apt attention, feeling bile crawl its way up his throat as he stares at the seemingly lifeless body on the grass. She looks so pale, so quiet. She looks like his wife, but then again, he’s beginning to think that the universe does not have that many differences between the Jemmas.

When he approaches her, gently sliding his hand along her cheek, she opens her eyes slowly. His heart beats so rapidly in his chest that he thinks it might burst out at any moment. There’s a soft smile on her face as she reaches up, covering her hand with his and all of his fears disappear in one fell swoop. Right up until she parts her lips and whispers,

“Leo?”

He feels like he’s been punched in the gut, and perhaps by the universe. Because his wife, she knows how much he hates that name. Fitz bites sharply down on his lip, fighting the urge to recoil away from her, because he really cannot deal with the universe sending him the wrong Jemma again.

But just as he’s about to begin cursing the cosmos again, Jemma laughs. It’s wild and free and she rolls onto her back, smirking at him between laughs. She’s never looked quite so accomplished in her life.

“You should’ve seen your face,” she says in between giggles, lifting her hand to cover her mouth as she dissolves into a heartier batch. “It’s almost a shame I lost my phone... I would love to have a photo of it for future reference.”

She laughs again, just as the reality of what she is saying sinks into him and he collapses with relief onto the grass, rubbing his hands down his face as she grins in his direction.

“You’re going to be the death of me,” he declares, shaking his head. Relief courses through his veins and he can’t help but grin back. She looks so tired, but so beautiful. (He’s seen her at her worst days and still thought that, though.)

Jemma grins widely, another laugh freeing from the depths of her belly. After all this time of the unknown, of being unsure whether or not he would actually manage to bring her back to him, he can’t help but become misty eyed and she’s the same, really, except her misty eyes become full blown tears after a moment and she reaches across to grab his hand. Neither of them move for a long while.

“That’s the plan,” she swears quietly, her voice just as watery. “Don’t you know I have a hearty pay out if you die young?”

Unable to stop himself, Fitz surges forward, pressing their lips together because, really, he’s been thinking about kissing her again for the better half of the time that she’s been gone, and she’s just being ridiculously silly right now and he can’t think of a better way to shut her up.

Thankfully, she agrees. She threads her fingers through his hair, and they both sigh happily, content to spend the rest of the afternoon in this field, making up for lost time.

However, Fitz has far better plans for where they can continue this; back in their home, where the other side of the bed has been aching for her arrival for months now, just as his heart has.

(It doesn’t hurt to spend a little while longer snogging in the field, though: the plane ride back will be far too long if they wait, and Jemma might just convince him to join her in the mile-high club. Or it might be him convincing her. Their options are still open.)

 

* * *

 

 Jemma doesn’t really have as many answers for him as he has for her, and for the most part, that’s okay. She doesn’t have the same kind of clarity behind where she was, and he wonders if the same thing had happened to the other Jemma. Perhaps interdimensional travel comes with a hearty cost. Of course, he would never complain, even if there is still some confusion between them.

Wherever she had been, she has very few details about it. She tells him that it almost felt like she was ripped out of the other reality prematurely and that most of her time away was spent in darkness. It was like an elongated dream, she tells him. And then he’d found her.

“It was like waking up in a different life,” she whispers. “You didn’t even know me.”

They’re lying side by side. She’s tracing his features quietly, fingertips brushing along his lips. She is still unsure of what happened, and so is he. He’s not sure what either of them could have done to have her transported across the realities and come back emptier than before. She’s still his wife, she’s still the love of his life and that’s all that matters. He knows to stop asking questions, or questioning the universe at all.

“They did get one thing right about that reality, though; you hated me there. Just as you did here.”

Confusion spreads over him and he immediately sits up, watching as her hand drops to her bare chest and god – seventeen-year-old Fitz wouldn’t have been able to focus with her breasts right there, but twenty-seven-year-old Fitz has seen some shit and can categorize. (It doesn’t stop him from ogling, though.)

“What do you mean?” he asks, eyebrows nearly scraping his hairline as he speaks. “When did I hate you?”

Jemma snorts as she rolls onto her back, rolling her eyes slowly.

“Oh, come off it,” she tells him, turning to face him once more, a look of pure disbelief on her face. “It’s been years, Fitz, you can tell me if you hated me when we first met. I’m not going to take it personally. I _did_ marry you, after all.” She lifts her hand, as if to remind him.

His eyebrows furrow as he concentrates, wondering how on earth she would have thought that he had ever hated her. Of course, it had taken him nearly two years to say anything more than ‘hello’ to her, but that was because he’d been fourteen, had never spoken to a girl before, and struggled speaking to normal people, never mind someone as brilliant as Jemma Simmons. She was quite lucky that he had managed to share their wedding vows with her, because he thinks that if it hadn’t been for the officiant reciting them back, he might have forgotten everything.

She’d left him breathless that day on more than one occasion, but seeing her there in her wedding dress... it has never left him.

“You’re mad,” Fitz claims after a moment, shaking his head from his thoughts and focusing back on the topic at hand. “I didn’t hate you. I was a teenage boy! A genius, at that. I didn’t know how to talk to people!”

Jemma rolls her eyes again, because whatever she’s convinced herself of is usually law in their relationship – okay, well they pick at one another, but that’s really because they love each other – and usually he wouldn’t fight her on this so soon after such an ordeal, but bloody hell. He’s been transfixed by this woman since the first time they’d met.

“Ugh, Fitz!” she cries, moving to sit up. “You were insanely competitive, you _always_ tried to one up me at everything that we did!”

“I was trying to impress you!” he retorts, and then lowers his voice again, breathing heavily. “Jemma, how could you ever think I could hate you? You... you’ve been stealing my breath for years now.”  

Jemma looks like she might cry again, but instead she lunges toward him, crashing their lips together in a less-than-perfect kiss that has them both breaking away and laughing midway through. She rests her forehead against his.

“You didn’t hate me?” she whispers softly, awe evident in her voice. “I was such a bitch when we met, just because I thought you were being an ass and all that time you were just trying to impress me...”

She laughs in disbelief, as though she can’t think how they’d managed to go on this long without realizing it. Of course, she really can. They’ve always been good communicators, but the beginning of their relationship was a sore spot. “Leopold Fitz, you big softie.”

“A softie that you married.” He grins, taking her hand in his and running his hand along her finger. He’s glad that the other Jemma had remembered to take the ring off before she’d left, so that he could give it back to its rightful owner now.

Jemma laughs at that, brushing their lips together in a slow kiss.

“Mm, I think I might hate you a little,” she murmurs against his mouth just as he laughs again, shifting to press her back against their bed, placing an arm on either side of her frame.

“Not even a chance, love, “ he whispers, breaking apart from their kiss to trace his lips along her jawline and neck, slowly moving lower.

 _Hate_ isn’t quite the word she uses very shortly after that, but he supposes it was never a word that they could have used to describe their feelings for one another.

(She agrees, mostly, but that’s partially because he stops midway to get her to admit it, out of devilment, and he thinks that he could have bartered for a monkey then and she’d likely have given it to him, as long as he didn’t stop. He makes a note to use that in the future.)

 

* * *

 

For reasons unknown to even him, Leopold Fitz stops cursing the universe.

(To be fair, he thinks that the universe could do nothing wrong as long as it keeps bringing his wife back to him again and again.)

Life goes back to normal - well, as normal as it can get for them.

Six months apart acts as the best aphrodisiac, it seems, and Fitz begins to think that if it weren’t for the fact that they were quite literally the main components of Radcliffe, Inc. that their superior, Dr. Radcliffe himself, would likely let them both go, given that they’d apparently found every dark corner that the cameras did not quite meet and defiled it.

Of course, it dies down after a while. It’s meant to, really, because he thinks neither of their aging bodies could handle the lack of sleep and the increased amount of activity they’ve gone through in recent months.

(It doesn’t die down completely, of course, but it does almost completely stop at their work place. The break room doesn’t count.)

After losing one another, even if Jemma never really gains the memory of just where she had been – she talks about it like it’s a different reality, but she can never say for sure. She never has the same markings that he does, the same longing, but it doesn’t mean that she feels it any less. After all, they’ve always been on the same page.

It’s always been like they could read one another’s minds.

Moving on from that goes surprisingly easy, but it does help that they remain a united force, even after all this time, and prefer to heal together, instead of apart.

 

* * *

 

Apparently, the universe has other surprises for them, too.

The first, and most important, comes in the form of a pink plus sign on the end of a white stick. (Arguably, the second could be the nausea they both have mere minutes after that revelation, but Fitz doesn’t think too much about that.)

The second comes in the form of a bright pink, screaming baby that’s laid on her mother’s chest a mere eight months later, and he watches in awe as they both begin counting her fingers and her toes, sizing her up to make sure she’s healthy and she’s safe, because he thinks they’ve both been reliving that fateful day years before the entirety of this, catching their breath every time something so much as threatened to go wrong with this pregnancy.

Jemma’s doctor had once told her that it was almost impossible that they’d ever conceive again, but when Imogene ‘Emmy’ Marie Fitz-Simmons is born on the fourteenth day of January, Fitz thinks that it must be some form of a joke, that they could beat the odds here, too.

The panic that had followed them through the pregnancy doesn’t leave immediately, especially when Emmy is born slightly underweight and has to spend her first week in the NICU, but she’s nothing if not the incarnate of her parents and blows nearly everyone out of the water at every following milestone. (Okay, so maybe that last one is mostly her parents’ opinion, but really, what parent should not be proud of their child’s accomplishments? Even if it’s something as simple as a bowel movement. God, Fitz never thought he’d be happy about something as ludicrous as that, but he’s been wrong before. Happily, too.)

Curled up on the couch with their daughter laid back against his chest, Fitz thinks about how the last two years of his life have been one rollercoaster after another, and it seems to be finally settling down some – except for the occasional heart attack every time their headstrong daughter tries to lurch forward and show off to just about everyone by hitting her newest milestone – rolling over – far earlier than was expected.

“Your Mum's just full of arguments today, isn't she?” Fitz tuts, shaking his head as he playfully glares at Jemma from across the room. “Really doesn't make sense, does it Emmy? We both know who's always right.”

Their six month old squawks loudly, pawing at his shirt as she giggles, happy enough to agree with him as long as he pays attention to her. He bends over and presses a loud, smacking kiss against her forehead, grinning as her giggles fill the air. 

Jemma, who up until this point had been tidying up the living room, awaiting Emmy's next onslaught of destruction, stops behind Fitz and places her hand on his shoulder, leaning across to catch his gaze.

“I suppose you mean the one of us who graduated top of our class,” she tells him, rolling her eyes as she presses a kiss to his temple and playfully grasps their daughter's tiny foot and watches as Emmy nearly nose dives toward it, as if she's forgotten up until this very moment that it existed. 

Fitz pretends to be wounded, holding his palm flat against his chest as he looks up at Jemma.

“Now, Simmons,” he says with a playful scowl. “That's a sore subject, because we both know that if you'd refrained from distracting me, I would have.”

There’s a wicked glimpse in her eyes and she smirks quietly, shrugging one shoulder.

“I guess we'll never know.” She grins, winking in his direction. “Unless you've got some mad idea about time travel now, too.”

“Well,” Fitz pauses, tearing his attention away from their daughter to focus on Jemma for the briefest of moments. “Considering recent events, time travel is definitely not off the table...”

Jemma laughs, and presses another kiss against his temple as she separates from them, shaking her head slowly. A thoughtful look crosses her face as she picks up one of Emmy’s favorite toys, a stuffed monkey (much to her Mum’s chagrin).

“It’s been a while since you called me Simmons,” she remarks as she turns back, handing their baby her toy and sighing gently as it immediately finds her mouth, like most things that are handed to her lately. She hasn’t started teething properly yet, but it’s coming.

Fitz watches as his wife moves around the room, deep in thought. For a moment he thinks that he’s lost her completely, because Jemma often goes on tangents in her mind and forgets to come out of them, so he grabs her arm as she walks by, seeing her tense before focusing down on him. An apologetic smile and a sigh pushes along her lips.

“What’s going on in that beautiful mind?” he dares to ask, because if there’s a storm brewing, he wants to try his best to help her along with it.

Jemma sighs again after a long moment, letting him pull her down on the couch beside him. Even without speaking, she thinks that he can probably tell something’s been bothering her. It doesn’t bother her often, because she does not allow it to, but every now and again it creeps up, consuming her whole.

“Do you ever think about her?”

She doesn’t clarify who she means, but there’s a look in Fitz’s eyes that makes her think he knows.

“All the time,” he tells her honestly, watching as her face crumbles. This isn’t the kind of reaction she wanted, but he’d long since vowed to never lie to her. “But it’s not the way you think. I wonder if she’s happy, wonder if he managed to pull his head out of his arse. I like the idea of us finding one another in every universe.”

Jemma smiles a bit at that, nodding as she leans her forehead against his. Emmy squawks in between them, oblivious to the moment and ready to fall back down on their carpet and make another mess of it. She lurches in her father’s arms, but he manages to catch her quickly, sighing gently as he places her belly down on the carpet and watches her carefully out of the corner of his eye. Emmy hasn’t started crawling yet, either, but he imagines that will come faster than either of them can handle it.

“You’re such a sap,” Jemma says after a moment.

Grabbing both of her hands in his, Fitz presses a kiss to her forehead and grins as he pulls away.

“Always,” he agrees, squeezing her hands between his. “It’s a nice thing, isn’t it? To imagine different versions of us – all falling in love in different ways?”

Jemma hums in thought before nodding her head slowly, grinning gently. “It is nice,” she acquiesces. “But I think I’d rather focus on this universe, if you don’t mind.”

Fitz barks out a quiet laugh, leaning in and brushing another kiss against her lips, unable to stop the gentle laughter that pours through him as he pulls away. When he does, she’s grinning wider, and he can’t imagine how he managed to live without her. It seemed like a lifetime ago, when in reality it was barely two years before.

“I think I can manage that,” he says after a while and wraps his arm around her shoulder, pulling her into him as they both settle into the back of the couch.

Jemma’s head curls into the crook of his neck and they watch as their daughter flips from being on her belly to on her back, then back again. They’ll crawl down beside her in a moment, make sure she doesn’t hurt herself rolling around as furiously as she does. The entirety of their living room is covered partially in soft carpet and partially in those life sized foam puzzle pieces, so the idea that she could manage to hurt herself, especially with how diligently Jemma had studied and baby-proofed their house mere months before she was due to arrive, is foolish, but given their track record, they allow themselves a few foolish thoughts here and there. However, for just a moment, they hold one another.

Right up until Monkey gets tossed just out of Emmy’s reach and she squeals, demanding both attention and Monkey immediately. Her parents, who have been clearly wrapped around her finger since the day she came onto this earth, can’t even argue with her demands, and both crawl on either side of her. Fitz grabs Monkey and lays it flat on Emmy’s belly, watching as she holds the plush close to her.

Leopold Fitz does not know what he did for the universe to give him this life, but he thanks it every day for giving all three of them this piece of serenity. Brushing that thought off quietly, he looks across toward his wife and watches her dangle Monkey above their daughter’s head, grinning quietly at the combination of their laughter, falling in love with her all over again.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for getting this far, if you did, and thank you for taking the time to read this fic. For those of you who are wondering, there will be an epilogue with Alt!FitzSimmons coming in the next few days. Stay tuned :)


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